


so long

by lulabo



Category: Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Genre: AAAANGST, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-04
Updated: 2013-02-04
Packaged: 2017-11-28 04:32:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/670305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lulabo/pseuds/lulabo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy takes Lizzie to the airport. And thinks. One-shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	so long

**Author's Note:**

> As someone who never jumps without a net, I'm posting this without a beta, so that's scary. Any mistakes are mine.

These are the things Darcy does not do when he leaves Lizzie Bennet to gather her things in that spare office: he does not call the concierge service downstairs and request a car. He does not kick the trash can, or his desk, his chair, the coat rack, the file cabinet. He does not put on his jacket when he grabs the keys to his car. He does not intend to keep a single appointment he has scheduled for the rest of the day, the week, the foreseeable future, which is as much as he tells Reynolds when he asks her to first get Lizzie the first best ticket home she can and then to meet him at Lizzie’s address in an hour. He does, as the elevator takes him to the lowest level of the parking garage, allow himself one instant of utter despair, a feeling of dread and helplessness heavy in his veins as it crawls from the soles of his feet to the backs of his eyes. Even as he draws his next breath, he gathers all the pieces of himself that have been knocked loose in the last month, bits and scraps of something hopeful that have risen within him like confetti thrown high. He presses them back into the recesses where they belong, gets in his car, and turns the engine over.

His car isn’t fancy, a modest sedan—if he’s given to excess in anything, it’s his business and his sister and it seems wasteful, frivolous, to care about something like a car, an engine to get you from one place to another. He rolls down the passenger-side window and says Lizzie’s name. (He has said Lizzie’s name a hundred times; now it feels strange in his mouth, as though he should call her something else. As though all the things he’s set low somehow include Lizzie’s name, and he can no longer get to it.) She is pacing on the sidewalk with her phone in her hand and her fingers flying over the brand new screen. When she looks up, her eyes are ringed with smeared mascara and her lips are red and raw, as though she has been working them between her teeth hard enough to draw blood. The panicked anguish in her expression is replaced briefly with confusion as she steps towards the car, propelled more by instinct than actual thought. Darcy does not get out of the car and open the door for her; he does not help her when she seems to hesitate between the front seat and the back. He does not even wait until she’s buckled in beside him before he looks over his shoulder to pull into traffic.

“You don’t have to,” she says. “I thought you were going to—”

“I didn’t know if you’d be comfortable with a stranger,” he tells her, “if you had phone calls to make.”

She studies him for a moment, but Darcy does not return her gaze. Instead, he keeps his eyes on the road; traffic this afternoon is against him. But he knows that there will be tickets held for Lizzie on the first flight and the one after and the one after and that she’ll be home soon enough, if not as soon as she’d like. “Thank you,” she says quietly. “I’ve been texting Jane. She’s—she’s in an all-hands meeting and she’s trying to get out between power-point presentations. She doesn’t like to make waves, Jane.”

Darcy shifts gears and the engine revs too highly for a moment. “What have you told her?” he asks. Lizzie hesitates, and he reminds himself there are things to which he has no right. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to pry. It’s not my business.”

“I told her that Lydia’s in trouble. I didn’t know what else to say,” she says.   
She looks out the window, turning her new phone over and over in her hands, biting her lower lip. Darcy hazards a glance at her. He does not reach out to her, does not run the tips of his fingers along the curve of her jaw. He does not rest his hand at the nape of her neck and try to ease the tension radiating from her shoulders to her temples. He does not push her hair over her ear to press a kiss there. All the things he wants to do to reassure her—touch her, hold her, tell her that it’s going to be fine—they are all out of reach now.

He hears Lizzie sigh. “Today started out as such a good day. I don’t know how everything got so fucked up with me and Lydia. I just—I just wanted to help her.”

Darcy says nothing for a moment, concentrates on not cutting off the jackass in the Audi that’s zipping in and out of lanes like he’s got the road entirely to himself. “I’m sure she knows that.”

Lizzie’s voice is hollow. “I don’t know that she does.”

It takes longer than he would like to get to the airport. They are silent the rest of the way; Lizzie runs her thumb over and over the playlist on Lydia’s YouTube channel. It’s on the tip of Darcy’s tongue to tell her that it won’t do any good, at this point, to suffer through watching any of it, that it probably won’t help. But it’s advice he knows he would never take himself, that he knows she wouldn’t either. If he knows Lizzie even a little, he’s sure she’s going to watch those videos until she feels properly punished, until she knows every look and gesture and word by heart. 

Her phone begins to beep as he draws up to the drop-off lane, and as he pulls to a stop, Lizzie apologizes. “It’s Jane. I have to take this,” she says. 

Again, he does not get out of the car to open the door for her, as she already has her fingers on the handle as she answers the call. “Jane?” She exits the car, her bag of books knocking against her knees. Darcy hears her say, “Hang on,” and she ducks down to look at him before she closes the door. Her skin is so, so pale, her eyes so wide in her face. “Thank you, Darcy, again. Thanks for—for being there, today.”

“You’re welcome, Lizzie.”

She holds out her hand to him, a house key resting in her palm. “Here’s the extra key to the apartment, if you could hang on to it or get it to Dr. Gardiner or—”

“I’ll take care of it,” he says. 

She wets her lips with the tip of her tongue and closes her eyes a moment. “Okay, then. Goodbye.”

He does not say goodbye or watch her walk away. He takes the key to Lizzie’s apartment, where Reynolds packs up Lizzie’s clothes and toiletries in a battered old American Tourister suitcase that still snaps shut. He finds an equally beaten footlocker beside a desk in an alcove off the kitchen, where Lizzie’s papers and books have taken residence. There’s a spiral notebook, its left hand side full of numbered to-do lists, the right with the beginnings of an outline in Lizzie’s spiky scrawl. He does not think about how he knows that Lizzie prefers ballpoint pens and college ruled paper, how she dogears the pages of nearly every notebook and paperback she owns. He doesn’t think about the everyday knowledge accumulated by proximity at work, acquired over a summer month in a shared house. He doesn’t read what she’s started to write about Pemberley, though it can’t be helped if he catches sight of the words _don’t gush_ as he closes the notebook and shoves it under a pile of photocopied articles. 

He doesn’t look back, just loads the footlocker and suitcase into Reynolds’ car and tells her to hire a cleaning service and have the mailroom ship Lizzie’s things overnight to her home in Fresno. 

Darcy is not an impulsive person. (Offering George Wickham that check—that was an impulse. He’s lived with the ramifications of that ever since.) He doesn’t do things without full consideration and the balance of time to weigh them. But even this has backfired. Before he’d told Lizzie his feelings for her, back in November, he’d thought about that. He’d lived with it in the back of his mind for weeks. It had sent him to Collins & Collins. And that conversation—there’s no straight line between that conversation and where he stands with Lizzie today, if he stands anywhere. And before that, he’d thought about whether or not he should speak to Bing about Jane. When problems arise, inconsistencies in his day-to-day, he evaluates the possibilities and draws his best conclusions. He gives everything its due and proper course. 

But today his thoughts are pinging in too many directions to be contained for introspection. So he calls Fitz, who knows the best gamers and programmers and hackers who don’t already work for Pemberley; he calls the PI who works for his lawyer. He needs Lydia’s phone number, and Wickham’s. He settles himself at his desk, in his home, and starts at the top of the contact list in his phone, a pen and a pad of paper at his right hand. He frames all the questions hypothetically, and he thinks as he goes that if there have been times in his life he’s been lucky for the connections he’s made as the head of a company that deals with digital media and social networking, he might never have been truly grateful for it until now. When he has an entire page full of questions and he’s only made it through Elliot in his phone’s contacts, he starts making calls.

What he does not do, however, is call Lizzie Bennet. The picture of her in his mind, that last glimpse of her on the curb at the airport, her pale white skin, her dark hair and searching, sad dark eyes, he pushes as far away from conscious thought as he can. He pulls up, on his desktop, George Wickham’s twitter page. It’s only virtual, and rises the bile in his stomach, but he meets George’s eyes on the screen and the resolve in him fills up all the empty spaces where Lizzie Bennet used to be.


End file.
